


Promises Made and Kept

by Ijustwannaread



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Dorks in Love, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda?, Post-Series, Romance, Slow Burn, even though they're technically together?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-04-14 06:44:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14130381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ijustwannaread/pseuds/Ijustwannaread
Summary: Edward comes back from his journey and attempts to say what has been left unsaid. (Behold: Winry and Edward's courtship in all its halting, awkward glory.)





	1. Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> I just love the smell of domestic fluff in the morning. Honestly, I didn't think I would write something even vaguely romantic, but here it is. I can't be alone in loving EdWin as a couple, and I couldn't resist playing around a bit with them as they actually get the stones to be a bit more intimate. (I'm imagining them as eighteen or nineteen in this story, so they're grown up even since he end of the manga.)

Winry stared down the empty line of train tracks with a singular focus. Edward’s train was thirty minutes late. She couldn’t help but note that, while she had been ecstatic to see Alphonse arrive from Xing tanned and grinning, she had a different kind of excitement to see Edward. They has left so many things unfinished when he left, things she was more than ready to tackle head on. Finally, the train appeared like a mirage in the distance. Her heart constricted in anticipation.

The doors opened, and there he was. 

Winry launched herself at him instinctively, and was quickly enveloped by the chilly material of his coat. When they separated, Winry searched his face, and found it glowing with happiness but otherwise unusually pale. There was something that reminded her of the way he used to look when he was on the road with Alphonse in the military- those days, he had always had a wiry, hungry look to him. Then, she had been used to seeing him look ragged and travel-worn, and often adorned with yellowing bruises and butterfly bandages. However, when she had last left him at the train station, he had filled out some. She had finally grown acclimated to seeing a version of Edward that was solid and whole. 

This newest version of Edward was more reminiscent of his younger, road-weary self. 

She might have said something, but she figured that they had time. Plenty of it. Instead, she pulled him in again and held him tighter.

“Welcome home.”

  
  


It was 7:30 am, and the sun was shining accusingly bright. Winry was absentmindedly stirring a pot of oatmeal on the stove. The sound of bare feet padding their way towards her broke her from her reverie. She turned slightly to see Alphonse entering the kitchen, eyes half mast and yawning. It was not who she expected. After getting his body back, Alphonse had slept through mornings. It had seemed a worrying amount back then, but Edward and Winry assured each other that he had been making up for lost time. They used to spent a lot of mornings together like that, waiting impatiently for Alphonse to rise, taking comfort in their mutual anticipation of seeing him each day, flesh and blood. It was a singular joy they shared that that didn’t diminish with time. 

“You’re up early,” she said quietly. Alphonse smiled sheepishly.

“In Xing, it’s considered highly rude to wake up after the sun rises in the morning,” he explained.

“How many Xingese officials did you insult at first, then?” Winry asked, quirking a smile at the thought. 

“A few, but luckily Mei filled me in before they decided to kick me out of the country,” Alphonse chucked, and and got that fond look that Winry took to mean that he was thinking of Mei. She had forgotten how transparent Al’s face was, just like his brother’s. 

Winry offered Al some breakfast, and they lapsed into silence. Winry wondered if Alphonse felt the same weight that she did after his brother returned. After the inevitable impassioned sharing of research notes and alchemic gleanings, Edward had been unable to hide that he was utterly spent, and went to sleep before the sun had hardly left the horizon. Maybe they both were just too afraid to ask what had really happened on Edward’s icy trip north, or maybe they still couldn’t shake the feeling that they were receiving proof that the idiot still didn’t know his limits.

Maybe they were frustrated that as much as they all wanted to protect each other, there were some feats that distance still made impossible. 

 

At ten o'clock that morning, around three hours after Edward would normally wake up, he finally stumbled into the kitchen. Al and Winry were swapping photos, Winry of her latest automail masterpieces, Al of the desert, and they didn't notice him come in until he accidentally banged his automail leg on the side of the counter. Winry spotted him just in time to see him conceal a wince, which he only did when his leg was bothering him.

“Morning!” She said, testing the waters.

“Hey,” Ed said, and began downing a mug of coffee. “What are you looking at?” He deflected, trying to distract from how rough he sounded and looked.

“Pictures of my trip to those ruins in Xing I was talking about, with the-”

“The inscriptions that might be the key to-”

That was the last that Winry heard before she tuned them out. She couldn't help herself. She liked watching them, and how it reminded her of how they used to be as kids. It was nice to be reminded that some things never changed.

The three of them ended up getting caught in the photos, and didn't notice the light changing from the brilliant morning haze to an ominous grey. When they were in the middle of bickering over which pictures to tack on to the wall, a crack of thunder startled them.

“Oh, I didn't prepare for rain, all the windows are wide open!” Winry dropped her pick of the photo lot and darted for the nearest open window. They all slammed the windows shut as the first drops of rain were striking the sills. As Edward moved to the last open window, Winry noticed how gingerly he was moving, and was reminded of how achy he got during storms. He probably had known a storm was brewing, though he would have considered leveling a warning to be incriminating. 

“Ed, you're walking all crooked again! Come with me, I need to readjust your leg,” she said, pulling him unceremoniously towards her workroom.

“Winry, I swear, you just love to tinker with my leg, there's nothing wrong with it!” Ed protested, but allowed himself to be led away. Winry shot Al a significant look as they left, feeling glad that the younger Elric had been graced with the art of subtlety that his older brother had most definitely missed out on.

Luckily, she always kept her furnace heated, so it only took her a moment to soak a towel and put in over the top.

“Sit down.” She instructed. Edward did. He looked positively gray in the face. Winry didn't even bother pretending to adjust some screws before she placed the heated towel on Edward's upper thigh, right on top of the knots of scar tissue where metal met flesh.

“Does that feel better?” She asked. Edward's only response was to let out a sigh of relief that sounded completely involuntary. It was so shaky and undone that Winry decided to make a bold move and tenderly brush back a piece of hair that had fallen out of his customary ponytail.

“I want you to go back to bed.” She said, giving him a look that she knew he wouldn't be able to refuse.

“Winry-” Even if he might try.

“I'll bring you a fresh towel in half an hour, just lie down and keep this here,” she said, pressing the towel back into his port gently.

“But -”

“You'll feel better.”

To his credit, Edward acquiesced.

  
  


Winry returned to the kitchen. Alphonse was sitting by the window, watching the rain. She paused for a moment, understanding that he was fully entranced by the sounds of the raindrops hitting the roof and the earthy smell that accompanies a storm. She crossed the room and sat down next to him. 

“I made him go back to bed.” 

“Good.” Alphonse’s eyes were far off and strikingly melancholy. 

They sat together and watched the lightning striking far in the distance.

  
  


Later that night, Winry crept into Edward's room to check on him. His blankets were pushed off to the side, and he was sleeping in an oddly contorted position that surely indicated pain.  Winry was struck by a tenacious urge to remedy his discomfort, but couldn’t decide whether she could adjust his blankets without waking him. Just as she had lost the nerve, and was slowly pulling his door shut, she heard his voice.

“Winry?” It wasn't quite a question, but a call.

“Ed,” In the yellow strip of light from the hallway, she could see he looked hazy, on the cusp of uneasy sleep. She crossed the threshold of the door and then the short space to the side of his bed. Edward paused for a moment, blinking up at her. 

“I missed you.” 

The storm ended hours ago, but Winry felt a surge somewhere in her diaphragm the matched the electricity of the day’s flashes of lighting. Her words of reply were caught in her throat. For some reason, the most natural thing seemed to be to slowly level herself into the bed next to him, so she did that. 

Winry fit into to the groove of his body with ease, but couldn’t help but shiver when her skin connected to the metal length of his leg, which was warm around the port where it connected to his thigh and utterly frozen from the knee joint down. When she shuddered, Edward reflexively reached his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer under his chin. 

 

“I missed you, too,” She said unnecessarily, and as she said it her lips moved somewhere right above his collarbone in a way that felt decidedly not platonic. The words hung in the air and felt a bit like a promise.  

 


	2. Industry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winry needs a reminder that what she does matters, and Edward is there for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just another plotless bit where I basically obsess over their relationship being built on a solid foundation of mutual respect, and understanding/empathizing with each other's individual struggles and desires. It's just... so good.

The phone rang almost constantly in the Rockbell household, a feature that had been intensifying still since the time when Winry began her apprenticeship in Rush Valley. Every time she returned home, she was constantly assaulted with updates on her client base, and new opportunities, as well as an intermittent and welcome gossip session with Garfiel, whose nosiness meant he knew everyone and everything.

Typically, she set the phone back down left with a feeling of renewed excitement about coming back to her job, the promise of new costumers and technologies dancing around in her mind. Today, she felt the empty stomach drop of disappointment.

As Edward would gladly tell anyone, Rush Valley undeniably had a shark tank quality to it, and part of the industry was people constantly vying for new limbless people to work with. It was an aspect that Winry stoically ignored on the regular, despite the person closest to her being part of the vicious cycle. After the Ishval War, which took away her parents, the ensuing boom in clientele was something hard to ignore, a painful ironic fact of life. That boom had lasted a long time, as clients took a variably long time after the initial loss to decide to commit to the surgery.

The bubble had to burst eventually, and Rush Valley was steadily becoming a place where automail engineers dropped all pretenses of bed side manner and more closely resembled starving bears lusting after newly sutured people as though they were no more than lifeless dummies. Rush Valley was competitive, and only the best of the best got work, even when they gave up their last shreds of humanity to do so.

Winry desperately needed this trip back home, away from the oppressive battleground of her livelihood. Her recent call dragged her right back. Garfiel had told her that a high profile political family has been ambushed in an assassination attempt, and the young daughter of the politician had just lost the majority of her hand, meaning that an automail engineer with a specialty in high precision functionality would more than likely have a new, wealthy client. He told her the laundry list of competitors who had already contacted the family, making bigger and bigger boasts of the prospective technology they could have.

Winry couldn't fault Garfiel for informing her anymore than she could really fault him for the callous way that he handled the family tragedy at hand. After all, this was part of the game. Everyone in Rock Valley considered any hesitation or restraint as a show of weakness on her part, especially as a young woman working in a male dominated industry. The name Rockbell had some respect, but not that much, once people caught sight of her long blonde hair and studded ears.

Winry stalked down the hall and slammed the door to her workshop. She stood by the door, frozen, surveying the room with fresher eyes. Hidden amidst the slew of random gears, pieces of scrap metal, and various metal working instruments was the blueprint for a new piece she was working on that she knew without even holding it tangibly in her arms would change the game. The idea had been in her head since the Promised Day, when improvements to Edward's arm occupied her mind in place of worry or panic about the end of the world.

She had been hoping to create an arm designed to be gentle, focused on the softer, more precise functions. Most automail engineers were obsessed with the idea of raw power, and where to mount knives or guns. How to optimize to make an arm a weapon. Winry had, too, but the gentler arm started as a private hope that Edward would come home and stop fighting. Maybe he would come home and write down some of the things he learned about alchemy. He never said anything, but she knew from watching him journal on train rides that he still struggled to write with the automail even after years of acclimation.

Nothing had worked out precisely as she had envisioned during those times. It was equal parts sweeter than she could have imagined, and more fraught with uncertainty and lingering pain than she could have foreseen. The plans for her breakthrough arm had somehow gotten buried.

This could make her career, but she couldn't seem to force herself to look at it. It felt corrupted. Reveling in another person's suffering that way? There was pit in her stomach suddenly ignited with a white hot anger, and she threw the nearest item, a knee joint piece, at a shelf. It knocked down a mess of metal pieces, which each echoed on the ground with a serious of clangs.

Tears formed at the corner of her eyes. She was alone, but she still fought against the impulse to give in to the full release of emotions that she felt so close to the surface. She was an adult, and these kind of episodes should be a thing of the past.

“Winry, what the hell? Are you okay?” Winry jolted, and spun around to see Edward standing in the open threshold of her workshop.

“Don't you knock?” Winry cried, head spinning. Alphonse and Edward were supposed to be out . The shock of Edward's abrupt entrance brought on the onslaught of tears that she had been fighting, and she covered her eyes with her arms as if it would hide her away. She hated crying in front of him.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Edward blurted, taken aback. “I just heard a crash! Did you fall? Are you okay?” He placed his arms on the sides of her shoulders, and inspected her for gaping wounds or forming bruises. His concern knocked the breath out of Winry, and only increased the flow of tears. She took a moment to get a breath, and swiped at her eyes quickly so she could look him in the eyes.

“I'm fine, I just got angry,” Winry said shakily. Edward deflated visibly, clearly relieved but newly confused.

“About what?” Winry sat down heavily on the workbench. She looked down at the ground and considered brushing him off. Instead, she recounted the accident, and the freshly limbless girl, and the Rush Valley response, flatly. She waited for Edward's face to darken like it did any time they were in Rush Valley and he caught sight of the hungry engineers lying in wait upon catching a flash of automail beneath his protective layers of clothing.

Edward blew out a breath, and plopped gracefully onto the top of her desk, his legs skimming the floor next to her.

“Do you know the politician's name, exactly?”

“Beckham, I think,” Winry replied. Edward looks her in the eyes.

“If it's Trent Beckham, then I met him once.” He said.

“Really?” Winry wasn't sure why she was still surprised that Edward's connections with the higher ups in the Amestrian political system ran so deep. Probably because he didn't give a damn about them.

“Yeah. He was the only person I ever met who talked about his family close to the amount that Hughes did,” he said, smiling distantly. Winry looked away, her vision distorting with a fresh round of tears that she managed. “He always used to brag about how great his daughter was at playing the cello. Everyone complained about it.” He said. Winry's heart broke a bit then, thinking about how that girl probably felt like her life was ruined. Edward broke her from her reverie by taking her hands in his.

“You need to help her,” He said. Winry started to form an argument resistance, but that burning look in his eyes squashed any words before they formed.

“Maybe I can talk to her, I'm sure Mustang has some contact info, and he owes me like a thousand favors,” Edward said, half to himself. He was already far off in thinking, like he used to get when thinking about alchemy.

“Ed! What makes you think her family is even going to want to talk to me? They've probably been barraged by a million offers, and she's healing and -”

“Winry, I didn't start healing until you started prepping me for surgery,” Edward said with conviction, and then looked away, suddenly shy once he realized what he had said.

“She's not a big pile of money to you, Winry. You'd never think like that. You're going to give her a new hand that works so well she's going to forget what it was like before that. You're going to look at her like she's still a whole person.” He told her. There was a heavy pause after that. Winry let that thought sink into her skin. Suddenly, that weight of Rush Valley and the competition and Garfiel and everything felt very distant, like the memory of a painful experience numbed by years and years. It felt simple.

Just as natural her impulse to throw something in rage was, she threw herself at Edward, flinging her arms around him. Edward's chest shook beneath her with a surprised little laugh.

“Geez, Winry, I have no idea what goes on in your brain,” He said, and she laughed then, too.

“You're such an idiot,” she said fondly, because he was dead wrong.

Edward was about to pout a bit, but she didn't let him because she pressed her lips to his for a brief moment. The second that they parted she could feel Edward's face heating up so close to hers. As she slowly leaned back she was preparing herself for the fallout, for him to clam up, but she surprised her by pulling her back in and closing the small gap between them.

 


	3. Cohabitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As their relationship changes, traveling together poses new challenges.

By the time that Winry and Edward arrived in Central City days later, the sun was cresting the horizon and bathing them both in the bright hazy colors of sunset. Winry's mind was buzzing, the impending meeting in the military capital looming upon her. She wasn't intimidated in the austere military milieu, and it had a tendency to fade into the background during her various interactions with Edward and his superiors. However, now that she had an actual appointment with one of the highest ranked officers she was beginning to understand how most people viewed the military complex: intimidating as hell.

Edward, who was usually out like a light on the train courtesy of his uncanny ability to fall asleep in any contortion, had been alert and atypically conversational. Winry appreciated the effort, but her stomach didn't seem as though it was about to unclench in the near future.

“I think that's the building where you'll meet the general tomorrow,” Ed gestured to an expansive and austere building looming in the distance as they made their way to the hotel. He furrowed his brow and peered down the road. “Or not... geez, all the military buildings are the same, I never could figure out where the hell I was...” he muttered. Winry swallowed against a lump in her throat.

“It's okay. I have the address,” she said faintly. She started to imagine herself sitting in a military office with dozens of giant men looming about, the general's eyes peering down at her with his lip curled in disgust.

Winry felt a warm hand fold over hers, and her grim imaginings evaporated. The only thought in her mind after that was to wonder inexplicably if the same electrical warmth would spread calmingly up her arm and deep into her sternum if Edward's hand had still been made of cool metal. She decided it probably would.

For the first time since they arrived at the train station, the pair lapsed into silence. As they walked side by side, Central City seemed to take on new color, more deeply saturated than she'd ever seen it before.

 

When they arrived at the hotel, Winry's brief bubble of calm burst when she saw their room. There was a single queen sized bed in the center. In the dim light, it looked provocative and romantic. She didn't even recall booking a single room consciously, as she and Edward had always had separate rooms in the past when he and Alphonse were traveling together. While it was undeniable that they had found their way to sleeping in the same bed more nights than not lately, Winry worried that her choice was presumptuous. She felt herself pale, and looked searchingly at Edward.

“Ahhh,” he whined. “I'm so tired already.” He flung himself dramatically onto the bed. Winry stood at the doorway for a moment before determining that there was something inviting in the angle of his body as he sprawled on the bed, leaving room on the side that she habitually occupied. Tentatively, she laid down next to him, letting the fluffy hotel pillow swallow her head. She breathed a sigh.

Winry's eyes flicked over to Edward. His face had suddenly turned tomato red, and he was staring at the ceiling. Winry felt a surge of warm fondness. Strangely emboldened by his lapse of boldness, she smoothly rolled over onto him, her torso aligned with the hard plane of his chest, and her left thigh against the inside corner of his automail port. She could practically feel the heat radiating from his face. Winry couldn't tell if it was the almost imperceptible upward tilt of Edward's head or her own desire that prompted her to pull his face towards hers.

Minutes after that seemed to blur together. The moments they spent together were undeniably fumbling, but certainly motivated by their simultaneous discovery of the true bliss of actual privacy, a space where they two of them could be separate from the strange trappings of a childhood home.

Their distraction was such that the drops of rain that began to patter at the window didn't register until they became a veritable cacophony. Moisture seeped into their room through the space left open in the window, but neither of them were remotely motivated to venture away and close it.

Hours later, Winry woke suddenly. As she blinked her eyes open it was clear to her from the deeper darkness of the walls that it was late at night, but she couldn't remember falling asleep. The next thing that occurred to her was the reason that she had woken up: Edward was shaking with little tremors so light that she wouldn't have registered them had their bodies not been tangled together.

Winry unwound himself from their embrace, hoping not to wake him. However, Edward's grip on sleep seemed tenuous, and he woke up with a sharp intake of breath. In the faint light from the window, Winry could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Shining even more obviously was the wetness lining his eyes.

“Ed?” She tried, tentatively. Edward didn't look at her, apparently not fully awake. He bent his automail leg in closer and curled in to hold it, shaking more openly now. Despite the fact that Winry had worked with automail patients since she could stand and was accustomed to seeing pain with a familiarity that few could boast of, there was something about watching Edward in pain that she couldn't distance herself from internally. Was it physical discomfort, or had he woken up from a nightmare? Maybe it was both.

Edward made a muffled, strangled-sounding noise.

“Ed?” She said, louder this time. She winced at how tentative it came out.

Edward finally registered her voice, and his entire body stiffened. He flew off the side of the bed, stumbling as his legs initially fumbled to support him. He gulped for air and seemed to try to gather himself. Winry wanted to go to him, but the distance of the bed suddenly seemed expansive and his sudden skittishness left her frozen.

Luckily, his brief flight across the room seemed to launch him fully into wakefulness. He stood there, fighting to even out his breath, and Winry relaxed fractionally.

“I'm sorry.” He choked, and covered his eyes with his hands either in a pointless attempt to cover the remnants of tears or to give him an excuse not to make eye contact.

“I'm sorry, Winry,” he repeated. Winry wanted desperately to say something to make him feel better, but she couldn't for the life of her understand what he was apologizing for.

“Edward, come back to bed.” She said. They could work this out. Winry recalled dreams she'd woken up from in a cold sweat, bad nights that kept her awake and lonely until the morning.

“I should have gotten another room... I knew this could...” He trailed off.

Suddenly, Winry felt less sympathetic.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Winry asked, not even wishing that she could be gentle with him.

“I don't-” Winry didn't want to hear it.

“What do you think we're doing, Ed?” It's fortunate for her that Edward is by nature obstinate and contrary, so her sudden frustration with him evened him out rather than causing him to spiral further. He took a long breath and finally looked at her. His eyes were wide and haunted, but Winry was done messing around.

“If we're going to do... this...” Winry faltered, but soldiered on. “Just. Come back here.”

God, if only one of them in this relationship knew the right words to say.

Edward staggered back onto their bed, sitting on his knees on the mattress as if it were a prayer rug. Winry crawled towards him to draw him into a hug, hoping it would relay that she was sorry for being harsh. But then again, Edward had always preferred tough love.

“I know that you hurt sometimes. I know you have nightmares. But if you only want to be with me when it's fine, I won't accept it. You can't only give me half, Edward Elric.” _Nice job, Winry, an ultimatum is very romantic,_ she thought. She wasn't about to take it back, but couldn't seem to let out her breath.

Edward got that look in his eyes that he sometimes got after a new lead had turned up, or he had a scientific revelation. A little bit dumbfounded. Winry figured that she had learned to speak his language.

A moment passed.

“Okay.” He said. Winry smiled, and kissed him short but deep.

“What did you dream about, then?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, please comment if there are any scenarios you want to see these two wacky lovebirds in next! (Also please leave comments/critiques, because this chapter was kind of a trip to write. Honestly, as my own love life continues to be a desert, writing this is a helpful hobby, weirdly! I love wholesome love and mild angst.

**Author's Note:**

> Might add more to this at a later date? (tbh nothing helps to deal with an author's kind of shitty irl love life than writing fluff about cartoon characters...) Hope you enjoyed this in all of its obnoxious saccharine glory.


End file.
